A contractor at the Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) was found to have used a computer at the agency to edit political commentator Raphael Lin’s (林秉樞) Chinese-language Wikipedia entry, the highway authority said yesterday.
Lin has been accused of physically abusing his ex-girlfriend Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kao Chia-yu (高嘉瑜), among other offenses.
Following the allegations of domestic violence, he was also accused of recruiting Internet users to sway public opinion on the case in his favor.
An Internet user on Dec. 5 found that Lin’s Wikipedia entry had been edited on Dec. 2 from the IP address 117.56.178.41, which belongs to the highway authority.
The agency initially denied that its IP address connected to Wikipedia on Dec. 2. Following an expanded investigation, it said on Dec. 7 that an employee had accessed Wikipedia a few times on Dec. 2, but the content on those pages was related to civil engineering.
The agency yesterday said that an internal investigation, which was concluded last week, found that three of its computers were used to access Wikipedia. Two were used to view content irrelevant to the domestic abuse case at 8:42pm on Dec. 2, and the third one had Wikipedia in the browsing history on Dec. 6, it said.
“We took the third computer to the Investigation Bureau for further examination by cybersecurity specialists. Their report confirmed that the computer was used to edit the Wikipedia entry on Lin on December 2,” the agency said.
The person who edited Lin’s information is a contractor in their 20s, the agency said.
The contractor told DGH officials that they did this out of curiosity, and apologized for causing confusion and besmirching the agency’s reputation, it added.
The contractor is in charge of promoting transportation safety in Matsu (Lienchiang County) at the motor vehicle office there and did not have behavioral issues, DGH Director-General Hsu Cheng-chang (許鉦漳) told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting at the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday.
“The contractor voluntarily went to the police on Dec. 5 and explained what happened as they were afraid of facing criminal charges. They did not tell their supervisors until after the police on Dec. 15 assured them that no criminal charges would be brought against them,” Hsu said.
However, the contractor would be subject to punishment by the Taipei Motor Vehicle Office, he added.
In other news, motorists who are fined for not having liability insurance for their vehicles would be offered insurance information when they receive official notice from the bureau, starting March next year.
The insurance information would be printed on a blank page of the official notice, the bureau said.
Of the 5 million traffic tickets given out each year, 200,000 are issued because motorists lack mandatory vehicle liability insurance, bureau data showed.
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